Music is a recurring theme in Arman’s work. In the early 1960s, he created “angers” of pianos, “accumulations” of trumpets and “cuts” of cellos and violins. The artist himself saw this as a “scandalous act” but a thought-provoking one. He talks about casting in bronze as part of his creative process...
Music is a recurring theme in Arman’s work. In the early 1960s, he created “angers” of pianos, “accumulations” of trumpets and “cuts” of cellos and violins. The artist himself saw this as a “scandalous act” but a thought-provoking one. He talks about casting in bronze as part of his creative process. “I made a violin cut in two which was cast in bronze in 1978. I realised that I could work with bronze in the same way I worked with wood. I quickly grasped the possibilities: if I broke a real cello, then to make it stand up I would have to mount the fragments in plastic or use screws to fix them in place. If I transpose it into bronze, the pieces remain free in space and stand upright. I felt free to do all kinds of things and I no longer needed to use plastic. In addition, bronze has the advantage that it can be multiplied: the mould is very expensive, and you offset this by casting a dozen pieces.”
Arman (Armand Fernandez), born in 1928 in Nice, was a French artist: a painter, sculptor and plastic artist. He studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Nice and then at the École du Louvre in Paris. Linked to Yves Klein from 1946 onwards, in 1960 Arman helped to found Pierre Restany’s Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) group, known as the Nice School. Arman, who signed his works with his first name as a tribute to Van Gogh, decided to abandon the “d” in “Armand” and officially adopted his artist’s signature at an exhibition at Iris Clert in 1958. In response to Yves Klein’s Void, his approach is the starting point for the “Accumulations” and “Angers” which remain the two strands of his appropriation of the object. He participated in many exhibitions in France and abroad. From 1961 onwards, Arman lived and worked in New York, often visiting Nice and Vence. He exhibited regularly in Monaco. Throughout his life, Arman was also an enthusiastic collector of everyday objects (watches, weapons, pens, etc.) and works of art, particularly traditional African art, a field in which he was a highly valued and renowned expert. He died in 2005 in New York.
